Boston Dynamics' creation is starting to
sniff out its role in the workforce: as a helpful canine that still sometimes
needs you to hold its paw.
This autumn, after years of dropping view-amassing videos
of Spot the robot dog fending off stick-wielding
humans and opening doors for its pals,
Boston Dynamics finally announced that
the machine was hitting the market—for a select few early adopters, at least.
BD’s people would be the first to tell you that they don’t fully know what the
hypnotically agile robot will be best at. Things like patrolling job sites,
sure. But Spot is so different than robots that have come before it that
company execs are in part relying on customers to demonstrate how the machine
might actually be useful.
And now, after a few months on the job, Spot is beginning
to show how it’ll fit in the workforce. BD’s researchers have kept close tabs
on the 75 or so Spots now working at places like construction companies and
mining outfits. (Oh, and one’s with MythBuster Adam Savage for the next year.)
They’re seeing hints of a new kind of cooperation between humans and machines,
and even machines and other machines. And starting today, you can even
customize Spot to your liking—the software development kit is now publicly
available on GitHub. Robot not included, though.
As an example of how Spot can help, says Michael Perry, VP of business
development at BD, the mining industry now employs self-driving subterranean
vehicles. But if something goes awry, like a sensor malfunctions or a truck
gets hung up on a rock, the operation has to shut down so a human worker can
safely troubleshoot the problem. But with Spot, early adopters found, the human
operator can stay at a safe distance, seeing through Spot’s eyes. “It's kind of
an interesting cognitive leap to start thinking about robots mending and
minding other robots,” says Perry. “It's a little far-fetched and it'll be
interesting to see how successful these customers are with that application,
but it was certainly something that I was really surprised by.” It’s the old
robotics mantra dirty, dangerous, and dull in action:
Advanced robots like Spot can tackle jobs humans can’t. (Or shouldn’t,
really, unless you enjoy venturing into mines to get autonomous vehicles out of
subterranean trouble.)
But there remains much that Spot can’t do. BD, for
instance, hasn’t yet deployed the arm that allows the robot to open
doors—that’ll come later this year—so Spot can’t fix a problem it might find
with an autonomous mining truck. And the company has to confront the very magic
that made it famous. A running criticism is
that by viralizing slick videos of their robots pulling off amazing feats (a
humanoid robot doing backflips,
anyone?), they’re setting the public’s
expectations too high. It takes a lot of work to get those tricks
right, and what you’re not seeing are the many times the robots fail.
So BD’s researchers and execs have had to sit down with
each prospective early adopter and talk through what their needs are, and what
the robot can and can’t do for them—or whether they even need such an advanced
platform in the first place. “We really try to work with customers and our own
internal expectations to make sure that we're not tackling a sensing task that,
if you just installed a bunch of Nest cameras, you'd have the same result,”
says Perry.
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